Should BYU basketball take a look at NBA dropout James Nnaji from Baylor, or has Kevin Young learned his lesson from the debacle of last season?
James Nnaji was a second-round pick in the 2023 NBA Draft. After being the first player off the board in the second round, he never set foot on an NBA court and eventually found his way back to college basketball, as has become common practice for players who hit the wall in the pros.
Around the same time BYU basketball added Abdullah Ahmed, a G-League dropout from the Westchester Knicks, Nnaji joined the Baylor Bears. Neither player impressed in college basketball, despite their experience playing at a professional level.
By the time Ahmed entered the transfer portal, BYU fans were ready to pack his bags and personally drive him to Salt Lake City International Airport. A similar sentiment could be said of Nnaji's stint in Waco, where the former pro scored just 26 points in 18 games and brought Baylor down even lower than they had been before his arrival.
Seeing Nnaji in the portal compels me, though. He calls to me. I feel like Tobias Funke in Arrested Development, pitching an open relationship to his wife, when he said, "No, it never [works]. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking that it might, but it might work for us!"
There was nothing enticing about Nnaji's year in the Big 12 Conference. There was nothing that stood out about the 7-footer that inspired confidence in his prospects as a collegiate athlete, and there's good reason why his name has plummeted all the way near the bottom of 247 Sports' transfer list by Florida's Olivier Rioux -- the Baylor experiment was an unmitigated disaster.
But if Kevin Young's objective is to prepare young players for a career in the NBA, why not take a flyer on Nnaji's upside and bring him along as a reserve? With Khadim Mboup currently the only center on BYU's roster, perhaps those two could be two-thirds of a vicious three-headed monster down low.
Still, it's a longshot that any college program will want what Nnaji is selling. You'll likely see this NBA dropout spending his next years playing overseas.
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